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Moshav Beit Hillel

Feb. 20 should have been far more joyous for Yuval Olshansky.

Olshansky, the general manager of Villa Vitrage, a resort at Moshav Beit Hillel in Israel’s northern Galilee, had dreamed of again welcoming guests following a 16-month shutdown of his business and of much of the region that began on Oct. 8, 2023, the day Hezbollah terrorists in nearby southern Lebanon launched war on Israel one day after Hamas’ invasion of the western Negev.

Sipping coffee on this Thursday evening in the property’s newly renovated café, Olshansky spoke of additional improvements done during the down time: upgrading Wi-Fi, installing new televisions, painting all the rooms, and landscaping.

His first guests, a couple, arrived a few hours before we met. Olshansky comped them as a thank you to the male guest, a soldier who’d returned from Lebanon.

“It’s thrilling,” said Olshansky. “Listen, he fought so we could live here.”

But at about the time the couple checked in, caskets containing the bodies of the young brothers Ariel and Kfir Bibas and of their neighbor on Kibbutz Nir Oz, octogenarian Oded Lifshitz, were being transferred by Hamas to the Red Cross and on to Israeli soldiers for repatriation. The three had been kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, and murdered soon thereafter in the Gaza Strip. (The body of another kidnapping/murder victim, the Bibas children’s mother, Shiri, was returned to Israel last Shabbat.)

Olshansky watched the handover on television, an experience that “affects you,” he said. “To serve food to people today wasn’t as happy as I’d thought. You can’t cut yourself off from the context around us.”

But another guest told Olshansky this: “It is fitting to reopen today. That is the answer. Darkness always exists. The way to counteract it is to make people happy.”

Rain fell throughout that day and night as I drove across the north along Israel’s border with Lebanon, including on Rte. 899, a road I’d avoided in January 2024 when reporting a Tablet story on Israel’s evacuation of most northern residents. The road was too dangerous then. This time, with the Israel Defense Forces having pushed Hezbollah north, and with a cease-fire implemented in late November, the area was safer. Gone were most of the tall concrete barriers installed on roads and meant to block Hezbollah terrorists’ views of vehicles to shoot at. Nature reserves and national parks had reopened. So had businesses—that is, those whose proprietors returned home or at least relocated nearby.

But many of those business owners, like the vast majority of residents of the north, still are living in hotel rooms or rented apartments, and with relatives and friends. Many will not return to their homes anytime soon, or at all—either because Hezbollah’s missiles destroyed or damaged the structures, or because they are spooked by Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion and aren’t confident they’ll be secure from Hezbollah. Others haven’t decided what to do. Then there are residents who intend to go back; some in this group are currently making plans to do so, while others aren’t sure when.

Those in the third category said that one consideration spurring their and others’ return is the national government’s planned cessation in early March of subsidies for evacuees’ housing and other living costs. Families with school-age children would be exempt until the academic year ends.

Olshansky and his family are poised to return home to Kibbutz Sde Nehemya, just down the road from Beit Hillel. But it means uprooting from Elyashiv, a moshav east of Netanya to which they’d relocated and where they made new friends.

“I’m coming home and I’m happy about it,” he said. “We’re starting again from zero, just like we did one-and-a-half years ago when we left.”

Rosh Hanikra

Ora Lekach bounced back and forth nine times during the 13-month war with Hezbollah, including in apartments in Mitzpe Hila, just beyond the 5-kilometer (3-mile) distance from the border that qualified for government-funded evacuation; Nof Hagalil; Nahariya; hotels here and there; and her own home. The 75-year-old resident of Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra, a community of 1,200 where the Mediterranean Sea meets Israel’s mountainous border with Lebanon, is now home—possibly for good, she said.

Lekach is back to working for an on-site company producing jars of jam, mustard, and other condiments. During her periods at the kibbutz, scores of sirens sounded to warn of incoming missiles or drones, necessitating runs to a nearby bomb shelter. Few missiles fell on homes and other structures, although plenty of debris damaged buildings and shattered windows. Until its residents return en masse, the kibbutz is renovating the clinic, grocery store, dining room, pub, library, and social club. Most houses lack a fortified room, so those are being added, as is a fortified room in the home where children live together. The wide lawn beside the dining room is manicured and lush.

“Because it’s home,” Lekach said about why she and her husband prefer to replant themselves here. “You know where your underwear and socks are, and don’t have to look for them. Yesterday, my 24-year-old grandson and his girlfriend visited. I love my home.

“I have an almond tree outside,” Lekach said, holding her phone to display it. “What’s wrong with that?”

About 400 people, one-third of the residents, are home again at the kibbutz—almost none being families with young children, who likely will stay where they are at least until the school term ends on June 30, said Galit Aviram, the kibbutz’s manager.

Emotional momentum is building for the community’s reconstitution. A printed sign on a concrete wall at the community’s entrance reads, “I’ve come home,” and under it, marked by permanent pens, are returnees’ handwritten messages and doodles:

Rosh Hanikra is my home!

There’s no place like home, and there’s no home like Rosh Hanikra.

Blessed is your return.

The Jewish nation lives!

Rosh Hanikra residents, I hope to see you again very soon and to return here to live.

We’ll return, we’ll love again, we’ll live out our old dream—the Zamir family, January 2025

[Inside a drawn heart:] A home isn’t just four walls. Rosh Hanikra is my home!

Several graffiti call for the hostages’ liberation from Gaza. A two-column list contains several names alongside checked boxes signifying those who’d returned home.

Just up the road, approximately 100 feet from a painted sign at the border that points travelers to Jerusalem 205 kilometers (123 miles) and Beirut 120 kilometers (72 miles) away, the Restaurant of the Cliff is silent. Its owner, Arik Daniaro, plans to reopen sometime in March, the target date that defense officials provided when they met with him in February.

He first must reassemble a 30-member staff of cooks, waiters, and dishwashers for the 100-seat, grilled-meat-and-fish restaurant. After being allowed to return to his restaurant, Daniaro spent a month repairing damage caused by two skylights broken by soldiers stationed on the roof and the rain and birds that subsequently entered.

The view—south along the coast, west out to sea, and 100 or so feet down to the water—is stunning, one that diners will revel in when they return. Springtime and the Passover break are coming soon, tantalizingly so. Tourism in the north from within Israel only recently resumed, residents slowly are trickling back to nearby kibbutzim and moshavim and towns, and foreign visitors’ arrival remains, realistically, months away. Even the popular gondola, just a few arms’ lengths beyond the window of the table where we sat, is an empty promise. Owned by the kibbutz, it ferries tourists down to the famed grottoes that give Rosh Hanikra its name—but its reopening awaits an inspection, and the European experts won’t come until Israel is again deemed safe to fly to. The grottoes and gondola remain closed.

Daniaro, a resident of Nahariya, 6 miles south, has owned the restaurant for 10 years; five have been lost to the pandemic and the war, he said. The government is compensating Daniaro for his losses. He’d rather welcome patrons for meals and drinks.

“How can I complain? What good will it do? Hezbollah wants us to leave, but we’re staying,” he said.

Daniaro is confident that this spring and summer will be busy and profitable for him and other business owners in the north. “Israelis, foreigners, everyone” will return, he predicted. “It’s a great tourist area.”

And if war in northern Israel resumes, he added, “We’ll close again, and then we’ll open again.”

Metulla

Sitting in his living room, a few hundred yards from a Lebanese village the IDF reduced to rubble because it attacked Israel, Eitan Gabay was excited for the future.

The next night, Feb. 21, his wife, Einav, and their four children would return home for Shabbat dinner and to sleep—the family’s first of each since early October 2023, just before they evacuated and settled temporarily in Tiberias and then in Hazor. In March, they’ll all move back permanently, because the IDF informed them it’s safe to do so and because the workmen now in the side yard building a new pergola will have finished it and installed it, just as they’d done with a new fence and a new toolshed—all to replace those destroyed by four Hezbollah missiles that last Oct. 4 fell just short of the Gabays’ home but sent shrapnel everywhere, shattering windows and pockmarking much of the structure’s façade on three sides, all of which also had to be repaired or replaced.

Gabay tilted his phone to show video of the missiles landing, images captured by his security camera. He expressed relief that they’d been evacuated and their home wasn’t destroyed.

The repairs will total 400,000 shekels (about $115,000), said Gabay, who knows about such things, working as he does as a construction manager. He was content to front it all to get his home back to new sooner rather than later, and awaits the government’s reimbursement as per longstanding legislation that pays back citizens’ property damages from terrorist attacks and wars.

The Gabays’ home sits on a ridge in the village of 2,000 people that in a vacuum is a picturesque paradise of green with breathtaking views of Lebanon on three sides, but that in reality is ever-vulnerable to attack because of its peninsular geography. Indeed, Gabay’s brother-in-law Levav Weinberg, an apple farmer who lives in a flat neighborhood of Metulla, was the subject of a 2018 Tablet article after the IDF discovered Hezbollah’s tunnels under his orchards through which it planned to execute a massive terrorist attack.

Gabay explained that he and his wife fully recognize the risk. The breathtaking location makes living where they do worthwhile, he said. Even after the Oct. 7 catastrophe, they trust the military to keep Metulla safe. If missiles are launched at Metulla again, he said matter-of-factly, they’ll shelter, as before, in their fortified room. If the IDF ignores future threats, as he said it did after some Lebanese climbed border walls to remove Israeli security cameras, the family will leave Metulla for good.

The Gabays will be able to return next month, even during the academic year, because the children all attend classes in nearby Rosh Pina (where Weinberg’s family has moved for now) in schools relocated during the war from Kibbutz Dafna, which also is a short drive away.

“From the beginning, we knew we wanted to return here. We didn’t want to give up on the north,” Gabay said. “There are always difficult times, but in the good times it’s a great place to live. You see the views.”

From the terrace of another home he owns next door and runs as a vacation rental, we looked out at Kfarkela, in Lebanon. A car and a pedestrian could be seen there, but everything else was stone-and-concrete ruins. The IDF had located scores of homes housing heavy ammunition and missiles, and tunnels originated under some homes. That doomed the village. Gabay is OK with it being flattened to keep Metulla safe.

“The enemy will always be here in the north, just as in the south. We have to deter them, and must react if they do something,” he said.

Gabay is pleased that the family renting the bottom floor of his second home is due back soon and signed a lease extension. He expects plenty more neighbors to return throughout March.

“Come in three months, and you’ll see I’m right. Once people return, the situation will … be safer than it was on Oct. 6,” he said. “Metulla has its magic, and it didn’t disappear with the war. Metulla was great before. It’ll be better going forward.”

I left Gabay’s house and drove into the village’s quaint center. HaRishonim Street, lined with stone buildings dating almost to Metulla’s founding in 1896, was dead, with no movement of vehicles or people. A bank, hotels, the ambulance service, medical clinics—all shuttered. So was Ayuni Pizza, a restaurant where my son and I once ate with a friend, Mike, an immigrant from Toronto who’d married a Metulla woman. They raised their family in town but relocated to the southern Golan Heights until the school year ends.

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do,” he’d said forlornly by phone the week before, which I took as, “We’re unlikely to move back to Metulla.”

I drove a couple of blocks to the Canada Centre, a jewel of a sports complex, with a regulation-size ice rink, indoor swimming pools, and climbing walls. National Hockey League stars like Jean Béliveau had visited here over the decades, for goodness’ sake. It’s where, before the war, Mike worked teaching hockey to Israeli kids of all stripes: Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Alawites. Some of its side windows were broken.

Like an innocent clearing pass that turned into a game-winning goal, hope came suddenly, unexpectedly.

On HaRishonim Street, a vehicle churned in my direction. A tractor. As we converged side-by-side, the driver and the man sitting beside him smiled and waved. I reciprocated. They were field workers from Thailand.

A missile Hezbollah fired into Metulla in December killed Omer Weinstein, an apple farmer, and four of his Thai employees. Maybe the men riding the tractor worked with their murdered compatriots. Surely, they’d have known them in this tiny community at the Galilee’s northernmost tip.

If they could smile and wave in greeting and go about their business in the village’s otherwise abandoned core, I thought, maybe everything would be OK.